Invaderbank
The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.
Anoushka Slater
While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.
Lachlan Coulson
This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.
maria m
The film entitled "Aelita," which is produced by Yakov Protazanov is significant due to it being the first ever fantasy genre film in Soviet cinema. The story follows a small group of people including a Engineer who becomes obsessed with deciphering a cryptic radio message and to finding a way to get to Mars. The majority of the film is set in Moscow although some scenes do take place in Mars, particularly the event where the protagonists starts a proletarian revolution. This scene in a way contradicts the whole entity of the film being science fiction as it puts its own spin on the revolutionary war. Protazanov seems to play quite a bit with lighting throughout the entire film especially in highlighting the protagonists in various scenes. For example when scenes of Aelita took place her entire body would be white almost to the degree where she would appear to be glowing. Protazanov most likely does this to give a sense of this "fantasy," this image of a "godly" queen. Shadows are often utilize as well take for example the scene were Los finally arrives back to Moscow after 6 months of working away where he witnesses two shadows of whom he believes is his wife kissing Erlich. Protazanov also plays with the shape of the overall clips to give an illusion of Aelita looking through a telescope. You can see this quite clearly in the scene of Los and his crew landing on Mars. Time holds a significant role throughout the entire film as the film is intentionally sped up. What seems to be 2 months in one moment suddenly becomes 6 months. When Los is at the train station after killing his wife, and is there once again near the end of the film when he finally escapes this fantasy life he had been obsessing about. Almost as if this moment had been frozen while he was dreaming. When the ruler of the futuristic totalitarian state would put the oppressed working class into a cold storage when he felt that they were no longer needed. This was a moment where time literally freezes for them as they are being put to storage.
jennyhor2004
Most current interest in this 1920s Soviet silent movie focuses on its sci-fi sub-plot of a trip that three Earthmen make to Mars where they are promptly embroiled in Martian politics and one of them, a revolutionary called Gusev (Nikolai Batalov), inspires the oppressed Martian workers to rebel against their despotic king and replace him with his daughter who is equally tyrannical. This sub-plot is part of a broad melodrama about an engineer called Los (Nikolai Tsereteli) who fluctuates between an erotic fantasy life revolving around an exotic aristocrat woman who worships him from afar and his real life in which his wife Natasha (Valentina Kuindzhi), neglected by him, has an affair with a rich foreigner, Ehrlich (Pavel Pol).Los's fantasy about the woman Aelita (Yulia Solntseva) begins when he and his colleague Spiridonov (Tsereteli again) receive mysterious radio transmissions from afar which can't be translated into Russian and someone in their department jokingly suggests the messages might be from Mars. Mars is a place where rich folks like Aelita and her dad King Tuskub (Konstantin Eggert) can spy on the affairs of other planets on a special TV made of geometric shapes and squiggly wires powered by Martian planetary energy harnessed by Gor (Yuri Zavadsky), the planet's chief scientist and guardian of radiant energy. Poor Martian folks on the other hand must labour in the labyrinthine dungeons of Mars and there's a rotating roster in which one-third of the workforce goes to sleep in deep freeze chambers when the available work dwindles. Good thing the capitalists on Earth never heard of that idea! Most of the movie's running time flits from Los's work ,which among other things involves volunteer work on an engineering project in the Soviet Far East and in his spare time constructing a spaceship capable of flying to Mars with Spiridonov, to Natasha working at a refugee centre, then an orphanage, and flirting with Ehrlich, to other sub-plots which include Gusev's on-again/off-again relationship with his wife and an investigation of Natasha's shotgun murder by the comically inept detective Kravtsov (Igor Ilyinsky). There is also a sub-plot that focuses on one man's attempt to cheat on the food-rationing system used in Moscow which calls audiences' attention to the economic and social plight of ordinary people in Russia at the time the film was made.All this means that "Aelita " can be a bewildering experience for first-time viewers unfamiliar with the immediate post-1917 situation in the Soviet Union before Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920′s. Repeating viewings and a foreknowledge of the film's plot and themes will be necessary for some viewers to understand and tease out the various sub-plots. Several sub-plots are Los's daydreams which the film deliberately doesn't separate from what happens to the engineer in real life so the narrative, and in particular the ending, can be very confusing to watch. A pro-Communist / anti-capitalist message is present in the movie but director Protazanov's treatment of it is very ambiguous: Gusev has second thoughts about allowing Aelita to assume leadership of the Martian proletariat and his fears are well-founded. This particular moment in the film serves perhaps as a warning of what could happen to the Soviet government, that it might fall into a similar autocratic style of government as the previous Tsarist government: a prophetic message indeed.Los realises his fantasy about Aelita comes to nothing but chaos, which might make viewers wonder whether it really is a fantasy that he has or something that actually happened to him. Fantasy women who hero-worship you don't usually try to co-opt you into their own nefarious schemes, do they? He decides that his goal in life is to be with Natasha, who miraculously is alive despite having been shot at close range multiple times earlier in the film, and work with her for the reconstruction of their country. Natasha for her part is willing to return to Los and give up Ehrlich. The film's message is that inner psychological rebirth is as important as political, social and economic rebirth if people are to co-operate and fulfill the goals of socialist revolution. Fantasising about flying to Mars as a way of escaping humdrum reality and the work involved in maintaining a marriage (and by extension, maintaining a community, especially a new revolutionary community) certainly won't help to bring about equality and prosperity for everyone.The film's production values are very impressive: in particular the Martian sets, influenced by the Russian avantgarde art movement Constructivism with its emphasis on abstract geometric shapes and figures, look very futuristic and in some scenes are monumental. The make-up and costume design for the actors playing the Martians are similarly abstract and angular though the headgear looks comic. The style of acting varies in keeping with the plot and themes: generally the Earthlings move and act in a natural way while the Martians, lacking human emotion, have a stilted and robotic style of behaving. Aelita especially seems a child-like and petulant aristocrat compared to proletarian Natasha who is portrayed as a warm and caring, if rather flighty, young woman. The editing helps here too, cutting from Aelita at her leisure watching Los on her TV or lounging about to Natasha cooking stew and scrubbing wet clothes. Hmm, what does it say about Los and his attitude towards women and social class that Aelita is a naive fantasy ideal that turns dangerous and has to be killed off while the neglected Natasha is ready to offer him love and support if only he would pay more attention to her and their marriage? Ultimately for most people the main value of "Aelita " will be in its sets and design but for students of propaganda and Soviet history, the film has a great deal to say about the difference between fantasy and reality. The lesson is aimed as much at idealists and would-be revolutionaries as for those still wedded to capitalist ways of thinking.
Igenlode Wordsmith
"Aelita" was screened as part of the National Film Theatre's science fiction season, but I can't help fearing that anyone who came to see it in the expectation of Martian adventures would probably have been very disappointed. (Edit: having read a selection of IMDb reviews, I gather this was all too correct, alas...) It certainly wasn't what I was expecting, but I actually enjoyed it a great deal for what it is: basically, an ordinary domestic drama of life in the undernourished, overcrowded post-war Moscow of 1921, with its black-marketeers, buffoons and ambitious dreamers. Intercut with this are the protagonist's imaginations of a stylised, balletic Mars, where the wilful figurehead Queen becomes fascinated with this alien Earthman she has never met; the more frustrating his day-to-day life becomes, the more he takes refuge in these plans and visions, and finally the two worlds become mingled entirely as he seeks escape in interplanetary flight.The obvious comparisons to make are with Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and H.G.Wells' "Things to Come"; I have to say that I actually found "Aelita" as visually inventive in its science-fiction sections as either of these -- and considerably more enjoyable. It has the human dimension and the humour that both of the former worthy sagas lack; for example, the soldier Gussev is obliged to turn up at the last minute for blast-off wearing women's clothing, because his wife has locked up his own equipment in an attempt to keep him from making the trip! And it benefits from the well-worn tactic of introducing recognisably contemporary characters into its alien setting to serve as audience identification figures; the dream-structure also allows it to get away with a good deal in the way of events that seem oddly arbitrary or clichéd at the time, while explaining them later. With hindsight I suspect that some of the revolutionary grandiloquence we laughed at was actually intended to be ridiculous (Protazanov had been a successful pre-revolutionary director who had only just been induced to return to Soviet Russia, and there is a striking sequence in "Aelita" where characters hark back wistfully to the 'old days'): the film has a good Soviet moral, but not the one you are led to expect, and it knows how to deflate the bubble of wild fantasy.Nikolai Tsereteli and Vera Kuindzhi make an attractive and sensitive leading couple as the engineer and his wife, although the latter suffers from the limitations of the orthochromatic film stock of this era which tends to bleach out blue eyes altogether, to occasionally grotesque effect. Pavel Pol is also impressive as Erlich, the agreeable con-man who is billeted on the couple, while Igor Ilyinsky and Nikolai Batalov provide comic relief without becoming tedious.The space technology shown has a definite air of Jules Verne, but take-off is effectively suggested using blurring camera views rather than extensive model work, and the characters stumble from their ship on landing in a convincing (and concealing) cloud of dust -- although there is an impressive fiery splashdown in the alien city. The Martian interior settings are deliberately conceived in theatrical terms, with the Martian characters moving in balletic mime that contrasts with the down-to-earth approach of the humans when they arrive, and there are some eerie scenes of the comatose workers being stacked for storage; the overseers with whips, on the other hand, are rather crudely prosaic. Some of the intertitles in the Martian sections come across as rather stilted, although it's hard to known how much of this is a problem with translation from what is presumably high-flown Russian. I did wonder if there were intertitles missing earlier on, as at some points the transitions seemed extremely abrupt.For this performance a minimalist live accompaniment was provided by the appropriately named group Minima in a modern idiom which worked surprisingly well not only with the visions of Mars but with the 1920s Moscow setting. For my own part, even at the moments when I felt that the film really had gone too far for credibility I still found myself well-disposed towards it as a whole; when it subsequently proved to unwind itself to a neat conclusion, I felt pleasantly vindicated. I had heard that despite the subsequent 'socialist realist' image, much silent Soviet 'domestic' drama is in fact very good, and on the basis of this film this genre definitely seems worth a look. Lovers of ray-guns (although these do figure) and space adventure, on the other hand, will probably feel short-changed -- as, apparently, did the original critics, although I'm glad to say that this did not prevent the film from being a box-office smash at the time!
Pixie
On the Opening night of the San Francisco Silent Film festival I was quite excited to see films that are historical and well not common. The guest speaker who opened this film created a sense of hype towards the obscurity, and how this film is underrated. The sci-fi part of the film was very interesting and fantastic for its time, but i'm not sure if it was due to the fact it was shown directly after the Brilliant 1928 "The Wind" or if it seemed that Russian filmmakers take after what Russian novels are famous for (hundreds of characters, tangled plots) but I know for certain that the dramatic parts, as in the parts on Earth, made absolutely no sense, were boring and I became lost within about twenty minutes. Maybe it was the acting but I found myself convinced as to why this film is "unknown and underrated": It's boring, there is no plot or basic story and the acting is horrible. This certainly is no "Battleship Potemkin", however I will say that Russian films do not make a real good effort in lightning up what life in Russia is like.
